Cáceres, Spain

Cáceres
Registered Sector: 
Old Town of Caceres
Location and site: 
Caceres was built on the summit of a hill in the vast peneplain of Estremadura. It is situated west of Toledo and at the same latitude, not far from the Tage River, near the Portuguese border.
Historical Function: 
Defense.
Administrative Status: 
Capital of the Province of Caceres.
Historical Reference: 
  • During the era of the Visigoths, the Roman colony of Norba Caesarina, founded on a site that was previously occupied by the Iberians, was a city of secondary importance.
  • In the 9th century, the Arabs seized this colony and named it Qasri, the citadel.
  • During the Reconquest, internal rivalry among the Christians led to new conflicts between Christians and Muslims. On four different occasions, the city was lost and reconquered. In the 12th century, under the Almohads from the Maghreb, major fortification work was carried out and there was a period of significant urban expansion. Caceres became the bridgehead of Islam.
  • En 1229, Alfonso IX, King of Leon, definitively captured the city from the Moors.
  • From the 14th century until the 16th century, with the end of the Reconquest, the arrival of the Hidalgos and the discovery of America, a number of monuments were erected in the feudal city.
Urban Morphology: 
The network of irregular medieval streets dating to the era of the Almohads is superimposed over surviving Roman axes. Narrow streets get narrower, or become wider, as they approach the squares. A trapezoidal wall of 1.2 km. length encloses the city. Originally laid out and constructed by the Romans, this wall was transformed by the Almohads who, in covering it with a harder pis‚, tailored it to Arab fortification principles.

Other than the fortifications, only a few of the monuments dating to the time of the first urban expansion of Caceres have survived. However, a large number of fortified buildings dating to its second expansion - palaces, towers and dwellings of stone - have been conserved, and these have been supplemented by palaces constructed following the expeditions to America.

Registration Criteria: 
"The walls of Caceres bear exceptional testimony to the fortifications built in Spain by the Almohads." (III) Caceres offers an example of a "city which was ruled from the 14th to 16th centuries by powerful rival factions; fortified houses, palaces and towers dominate its spatial organization. The example is unique because it "bears the traces of highly diverse and contradictory influences, such as Islamic art, Northern Gothic, Italian Renaissance, arts of the New World, etc." (IV)